From Tirana: Berat – The City of a Thousand Windows & Its Living Castle

Head south from Tirana across the Albanian lowlands toward the Osum River valley. The guide introduces Albania's extraordinary medieval heritage — a country that was a crossroads between the Byzantine, Ottoman and Venetian worlds, and that contains some of the most intact medieval architecture in Europe precisely because its 45 years of Communist isolation (1945–1990) prevented the development and modernisation that destroyed similar sites elsewhere. Berat was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 alongside Gjirokastër.

Berat Castle sits on a limestone hill 187 metres above the Osum River. The earliest fortifications date to the 4th century BC, when the Illyrian tribe of the Dassaretii built a hilltop settlement here. The Byzantines expanded the walls significantly in the 6th century AD under Emperor Justinian, creating the defensive circuit still largely visible today. The Ottomans, who took Berat in 1417, added their own improvements and the castle remained an active military installation until the 20th century. What makes the Kala unique is that it was never abandoned: Albanian families continued to live within the walls through Ottoman rule, through the Communist period (when religious buildings were converted to storage), and to the present day. Within the castle the guide visits St Mary's Church (now the Onufri Museum, housing 16th-century icons in Onufri's famously vivid red pigment), the Church of the Holy Trinity (13th century, with original Byzantine frescoes), and the ruins of a mosque and Roman cisterns.

Below the castle, the Mangalem quarter occupies the steep western bank of the Osum — Ottoman-era stone houses stacked up the hillside with their characteristic large bay windows (one row for each floor, maximising the view and light). The houses are built over Byzantine and Roman foundations; archaeologists regularly discover mosaic floors and ancient walls beneath Ottoman structures. The guide covers the architectural tradition that gives Berat its UNESCO nickname: the double rows of arched windows facing the river, each one reflecting the house opposite across the valley. Cross the Ottoman-era Gorica Bridge to the eastern bank and the Gorica quarter, where a similar landscape unfolds on the opposite hillside — the two neighborhoods mirroring each other across the river, with the castle watching over both from above.